Housekeeping

I’m in the middle- or have at least begun- more than an advisable number of books. But today I finally finished Housekeeping, which I’ve been working on for awhile but which finally grabbed me by the throat last night. I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (her second work of fiction after Housekeeping) last year, and I highly recommend it. One of the most interesting things about it, and now Housekeeping, is that both books are well-under 300 pages, and yet they are not fast reads. Robinson’s writing has a way of making your eyes slow down and absorb every word until suddenly you feel like you have been in the desert for days and only by reading more can you even begin to quench your thirst. It takes amazing skill to open up a hole in a reader with things as simple as everyday life, meals, conversations and musings, and yet, it is only after being convinced that the characters are just as isolated and hum-drum as we sometimes feel that the writing and ideas suddenly culminate and twist into profound statements- and we as a reader will let them because we have been convinced of the characters’ basis in reality.

I woke up this morning to an email forwarded to me by Cassandra from a guy we knew in college, and it detailed how all of the people in my FIG/dorm and former roommates were either married or engaged. This, quite predictably, made Cassandra feel like she should get hitched, and left me thinking about people I’ve known and left behind (or who have left me behind).

I wrote the above 20 days ago and never got back to it. But I remember what I was thinking: in the book, the main character becomes a vagabond rather than leave her aunt like her sister did. And she doesn’t stay because she loves her aunt in an overwhelming kind of way, but rather because both had been left by enough people (including said sister), that she stayed to not become another member of her family with a history of abandonment.

A lot of life involves leaving or being left. Some of it is done deliberately. We change apartments, cities, roommates, jobs. We slam doors and delete phone numbers and forget names. We leave the warmth of beds every morning and sometimes choose not to return to the same bed at the end of the day. And some leaving is none of our choosing. Words are hurled that cannot be taken back, or silence is built into a wall, and most irrevocably of all, death comes. But mostly, it is time that is the culprit- how slow a clock hands turn deceives us into thinking our lives are not changing and leading us away from the very people we consider central today.

In Housekeeping, it is the people closest who are most easily lost. A father leaves (indeed, the book is curiously devoid of men except on the fringes), a grandfather is killed in a train crash into a lake, a mother abandons her children and then drives a car into the same lake, a grandmother dies, a teenage sister moves out, and an aunt is emotionally devoid. The ties of family, which are most often taken for granted, are the most fragile in this universe. And it made me realize the same is true in life. I’ve lost touch with nearly all of the people in my dorm from college, people who I laughed and cried with, and I realized because of this email, that they had all kept track of each other and I had not. Some of these ties were intentionally broken by fights and falling outs and some just by each of us changing and lives leading in different directions.

I began to think about when the last time I’d heard these names was exactly, and wonder how I’d fallen out of touch, and I realized that it was in a gradual instant, which is exactly what our lives are made up of- a shift that seems to happen overnight but has actually been happening for months. The kicker is that most of these changes we aren’t even aware of happening, even though they’re all choices we’re making, everyday- the phone calls and emails we return, the trips we take, the leases we sign. And always, always in the background the ones we don’t.

We make the decision every day who we will leave and who we will take into tomorrow. We just don’t always know it until six months or three years later. Sometimes, such as in Housekeeping, even if they’re not the person we want to be with, we make the choice to go with them just so there’s not one more abandonment, or so we’re not the ones doing the leaving. And sometimes you wake up to emails about long-lost people who all have completely different lives than they did when they were a part of yours. It’s possible to track them down, to try to renew the ties, but for what purpose? Out of curiosity or nostalgia, a desire to reshape the past, or to prove ourselves? To make different choices today about who we want in our lives than we did before? Or maybe it’s for a much simpler wish: to not be left behind this time.

Maybe that’s why it’s interesting to me who adds me on Facebook, or which former residents of Hatch Hall emails one of my best friends to invite her to his wedding even though he had to Google her to even find out where she was now: I’m not always sure what the motivation is.